Life — December 17, 1914 — page 2: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# Analysis This page combines advertisement and political satire. The main advertisement promotes Timken Axles and Bearings with a caricatured face and product imagery, encouraging car owners to educate themselves about automotive mechanics. The column titled "The Ways of the Capitalist" presents a scathing critique of capitalist behavior through poetic verse. It portrays the capitalist as morally corrupt—exploiting natural resources ("the treasures in the bowels of the earth"), manipulating prices, controlling political figures ("lawmakers, judges and Presidents"), and crushing labor movements. The satire culminates with the prediction that workers and earth itself will outlast capitalist exploitation. This reflects early 20th-century socialist or labor-sympathetic sentiment common in Life magazine's satirical content during this era.